Chance Encounter

Merce Cunningham bows out.

Cunningham often determined matters by rolling dice or throwing the I Ching.

Illustration by André Carrilho

Merce Cunningham, incontestably the grand master of modern dance—and the man by whom it was converted, belatedly, to modernism—died two and a half years ago, at the age of ninety. For most of his adult life, he had John Cage as his partner, and it was from Cage that he learned what would be the most distinctive principle of his art: chance. He created the modules of his choreography (solos, duets, ensemble passages) according to his own artistic logic, but most other matters, crucial matters—how many dancers there would be in a passage, where they would enter, where on the stage, and for how long, they would dance—were determined by such means as rolling dice or throwing the I Ching. (Cage was absorbed in Zen Buddhism, and so, eventually, was Cunningham.) Furthermore, Cunningham had the composer and the set and costume designers do their work without consulting one another, or him. In other words, he sliced apart the connections, jumbled the syntax: the specification of what followed what, what was more important than what. The purpose, he said, was to avoid clichés, but to him, apparently, the leading cliché was narrative.

Most important was the withdrawal of musical support. For “Second Hand” (1970), Cunningham wanted to use Satie’s “Socrate.” When Satie’s publisher refused permission, Cage created a new score, using Satie’s structure but employing chance operations to supply new pitches. Believe me, the result does not sound as good as “Socrate.” Modernism characteristically shows a certain amount of what we, or our parents, would call ugliness, but Cunningham’s musical program displays more ugliness, or simply triviality. Sometimes I thought that if I heard Cage or one of his followers banging a stick on a stick or blasting static on the sound system one more time I would run screaming from the theatre, and I am certain that the music, much more than the dance, was the reason that until about the nineteen-seventies many people did indeed put on their coats and leave in the middle of Cunningham’s shows.

Actually, a number of Cunningham’s most powerful works did not obey the rule of chance. He said as much. We know from “Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years,” by the critic David Vaughan, Cunningham’s archivist, that when the choreographer was making his weird and crazy “RainForest” (1968) he went to the Leo Castelli gallery and saw some silver Mylar pillows by Andy Warhol that looked as though they belonged in a Bloomingdale’s window. He asked Warhol if he could use them. So there, in the middle of the psychotic-looking “RainForest,” are these big, fat, jolly, punchable pillows floating around. They were exactly what Cunningham, being who he was, needed to counterbalance the emotionalism of the dance. And they were not chosen by chance.

Still, he did want to frustrate our story-making tendencies. Some observers claim that, whatever he said, all his dances have stories. He himself told interviewers that dance can never be truly abstract, because it is performed by the human body, which always has psychological meaning for us. Sounds nice, but certain Cunningham dances do, in fact, look truly abstract, and that, I think, is what makes some people say that his works run together in their minds—that they can’t remember which is which. It is also what makes his work so hard to write about. You can’t tell a story about something in which you can’t find a story.

In his later years, Cunningham became very interested in technology. He turned to a computer program to give him movement ideas, and in “Biped,” from 1999, he used “motion capture.” On a scrim at the front, the dance occurring onstage was reproduced by enormous calligraphic figures or even odder shapes, like pick-up sticks or bubbles. This was a thrill: the forms on the scrim looked like memories, or hallucinations, of dance. Some people, however, thought that the motion capture blocked our feelings for the real dancers. Cunningham was said to be an aloof man. Several of his dancers have recalled how little hands-on guidance he gave them. When there was trouble in the company, he tended to go into his office and close the door. You turned to Cage if you had a problem.

For years, I felt that Cunningham’s use of chance weakened his dances. If Mother Nature gave us brains, shouldn’t we use them, instead of rolling dice? But now, after so much time, I can’t imagine Cunningham’s work without chance. And it did give him something huge. Vaughan quotes Cunningham to the effect that stories or even themes put the spectator in the position of someone standing on a street corner waiting for a friend who is late: you can’t see the cars or the buildings or the sky, he said, because “everything and everyone is not the person you await.” So it was, he felt, with dancing in which you expect a meaning beyond the physical facts, and he wanted to show us the physical facts, the very cell of movement. He also wanted to show his dancers, and he believed that his non-narrative methods allowed them to come before us more clearly: in his words, “naked, powerful, and unashamed.” Recently, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, one of his dancers, Silas Riener, performed a solo in which, while balancing on one leg, with the other leg in the air, he bent way over to the side again and again, and then righted himself. Almost anyone else would have fallen. The spectators gasped, and, when the solo was over, they clapped, which Cunningham fans almost never do in the middle of a piece. They were right to. This was a heart-stopping sequence, and it was more about human possibility than about anything else. It helped that Cunningham’s dancers were never “facey.” No smiles, no grimaces. What one saw on their faces was simply what Roger Copeland, in his 2004 book, “Merce Cunningham,” called “the thought-process-made-visible: a complete concentration on the task at hand.”

There is always a question, with a modern-dance company, whether the troupe should continue after the creator’s death. And, if so, where will it get the funding? People with money want to give it to the new thing, not the old thing. Cunningham unflinchingly decided that his company—almost sixty years old, and an enormous force, abroad (especially in France) as well as at home—should fold once he was gone. He established a trust to license his work to other companies, with his veteran dancers coaching them. He further stipulated that after his death the troupe should go on a long tour, and that is what it has been doing for the past two years, taking a selection of eighteen works to fifty-odd cities in America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. This “Legacy Tour” culminated in six brief shows at the Park Avenue Armory, at the end of December. After the final performance, there were no speeches, no confetti. The dancers, their beautiful bodies wet and shivering from their efforts, took their bows and that was that. “Dance is most deeply concerned with each single instant as it comes along,” Cunningham said. “It is as accurate and as impermanent as breathing.” Calmly, in his apartment, on July 26, 2009, Cunningham stopped breathing, and so, on New Year’s Eve, did his company.

As impermanent as breathing: it would be nice, and appropriately Zen-like, to say that the birds will fly, the rivers will run, and Cunningham’s work, with them, will flow away. But I am not a Buddhist, and it seems to me that his absence will have a terrible effect. Dance is a small field, and any major loss, even if people eventually forget it, is not without consequence. I try to think what other artist Cunningham was like. All I can come up with is Blake. Cunningham was that clear, that unpretentious, that visionary, in a modernist way. Now that he is gone, his kind of blunt beauty will vanish from dance. Maybe, in twenty years, a different master will revive it. Or maybe it will just die. ♦

Joan Acocella has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. She served as the magazine’s dance critic from 1998 to 2019. She is the author of, most recently, “Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints.”

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